Apart from Houston and New England, every MLS team is pretty much unrecognizable from 2005 to today. (Houston's pretty much the same....except for the whole entirely different front office, stadium, fans, city and state thing.) Teams at the bottom are supposed to blow up the squad every year, sure, but here was DC United's 2005 Opening Day lineup:

You can count the number of guys still around one the fingers of one hand, unless you're Cubs Hall of Famer Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown, or Nightcrawler from the X-Men. Different coach, too.

And that's without factoring in playoff success and failure...although, you pretty much should, because once you throw out that 2005 outlier, you do get pretty consistent results.

Which shouldn't actually happen, because short series in short time frames should produce a much, much greater variance.

So, we have consistent results (apart from a couple of teams at either end of the probability bell curve like Dallas and Los Angeles, and even they've been consistent in the playoffs the last two years), in a league with near constant turnover across the board. Including going into this year. Even New England and Houston have been forced to make changes, thanks to salary cap or negotiation issues.

And yet, the only potential misstep in predicting order of finish going into this year is remembering which San Jose to put in second, and which to put in last. Come on, MLS, it's not the Guideline of Averages. Let's have a Toronto-Earthquakes final this November, shake things up a little.